Dark wit for economic collapse
Lionel Shriver’s novel imagines a terrifyingly plausible future
Think the financial crisis of 2008 was bad? That was a hiccup compared to the complete economic collapse envisaged by Lionel Shriver in her thirteenth novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.
Beginning exactly 100 years after the real-life Great Depression, this darkly witty family saga depicts a dystopian U.S. where the market crashes, the dollar tanks and inflation skyrockets. A single cabbage costs $20, then $40. Owning gold, even a wedding ring, is treasonous.
The Mandible family thinks they’re above it all until the nonagenarian patriarch, Grand Man, learns his massive portfolio is suddenly worthless. Their hopedfor inheritance now vanished, three generations of Mandibles must move in together, crammed into a tiny Brooklyn house. In handling their new reality, some of the Mandibles get chewed up in the process, while others become devourers.
The focus starts out on two middle-aged sisters, frugal Florence and spoiled Avery. More intriguing are Florence’s peculiar teenage son Willing, who understands financial theory perhaps better than his economics prof uncle, and Great-Aunt Nollie, a childless, opinionated, hot-chili-eating, Europe-loving novelist, much like the author herself. Nollie’s father says, “For most people, what lies outside our front door is tragedy. For [Nollie], it’s material.” He could have been talking about Shriver.
Shriver has built a stellar international reputation out of writing biting fiction on dark and difficult subjects: school massacres ( We Need to Talk About Kevin), obesity ( Big Brother), health care ( So Much For That). Here too, in The Mandibles, Shriver has created a meticulously realized world. Southeast Asia runs the U.S. economy — KFC now stands for Korean Fried Chicken, and IBM is Indonesian Business Machines. Mexico has built a wall, all right, but it’s to keep poor, desperate Ameri-trash out. Crime is rampant, but the FBI has been reduced to little more than a website and the CIA’s Langley headquarters have been taken over by a Punjabi discount grocery chain. Asia looks to the U.S. for cheap labour and white women have facial surgeries to resemble Asians.
Shriver, with a background in financial journalism, certainly knows her economics, but she sometimes delivers it in a heavy-handed way, in lengthy explanatory speeches as dinner-table conversation. But she has fun with language: “malicious” is the new slang for awesome, “careless” means cool and the biggest insult is to call someone “a T-bill.”
As one character says, “Plots set in the future are what people fear in the present.” Sharp and wryly unpredictable, The Mandibles is also chilling because, set in the very near future, it’s so eminently plausible. After reading it, I had a strong urge to call my financial planner. Journalist Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) is a frequent contributor to the Star’s Books pages.